UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

9 thoughts on “558 – Cotton Clad Calamity”

  1. Yup, he’s a bastard XD

  2. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Are those pajamas available in XXXL in the gift shop?

  3. It’s been a while, so let me ask: Did we get a reason for him to WANT Susie dead? Not to backseat, but if we didn’t, I’m worried were about to move into “Stupid Evil” territory. Now, stupid happens, don’t get me wrong. It’s not bad storytelling for that to be the case here.

    You’ve just done a good job NOT having that be a driving factor, so the “Kill off the stars of my successful reality TV show.” seems shortsighted, otherwise. Oh, I guess I could be mistaken about the in-story reality TV show’s success. Like, if the company behind them is losing money, or they think a change in management at the ranch would make the whole thing more popular/profitable, then I can see the above scenario happening as well.

    I REALLY think I’m just forgetting something important, but that I don’t have time to deep dive to remind me of, hence the comment. >_<

    1. It certainly has been stretched out over quite a while, but there have definitely been hints from quite near the beginning that whoever is running the reality TV show definitely wants her dead.

      But I certainly don’t recall any reason why.

      1. Yeah it’s fair to not remember since it’s been a hot minute (many, many minutes) but if you feel like a refresher the most relevant bits would be the beginning of Episode 8 and the end of Episode 15. We haven’t explicitly spelled out exactly what The Exec means by his “side hustle” or who was on the other end of that phone call, though.

        I’m hoping that when the whole thing is eventually available it will make sense, or at least enough sense to have hung this narrative on.

        1. Thanks for the replies, Deoxy and Clint. Yeah, I’d totally forgotten about those things. Good to know!

  4. Seems about time for the two people who aren’t there to make a surprise entrance as the ace Susie didn’t even know she had.

  5. There’s still 3-5 people on her side that might be planning something. This guy is a megalomaniac with a god complex, so letting him think he’s the sharpest tool in the shed sets him up for a fall. Everything depends on those cameras, and I suspect their little stop over by the charging coffins had something to do with her actual plan, not the one the a-hole thinks it is.

  6. Really enjoyed the opening of Zombie Ranch. I like the combination of the western setting with the zombie concept, it gives the story a really distinctive atmosphere. I’m a freelance illustrator and animator, and I’d be interested in seeing how some of these scenes could translate into motion, especially as a short animated teaser or character scene.

    If you’re ever interested in something like that, you can reach me here:

    IG: eve_verse_
    Email: [contact.lilaclines@gmail.com](mailto:contact.lilaclines@gmail.com)
    Discord: Lyralilac_

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558 – Cotton Clad Calamity

What would you call this? Armchair assassination? Merk-from-home?

Well, Suzie ain't dead (or undead) quite yet, so we'll just have to see if his gloating is justifiable.

The Copyright Chronicles come to an end…

So, a few months ago I posted this blog entry: The Copyright Chronicles. In it I detailed my ongoing frustrations with what should have hopefully been a fairly straightforward process of officially registering a copyright with the U.S. government.

I mean, yeah, I brought it on myself. I’ve talked many times about how copyright protection is automatically established as soon as a given work is produced in “fixed form.” You really don’t need to do anything beyond the act of creation unless you imagine that someday you might be suing someone for infringement and hoping to get monetary compensation out of the decision.

Do I think that will happen with Zombie Ranch? To be perfectly honest, I hope not, but some deep-seated masochistic urge led me to delve into the experience of formal copyright registration. It was supposed to be a matter of electronic filing, a $55 application fee, and a wait of 6-8 months for processing, at the end of which we would receive our certificate. I think it would have if we weren’t trying to register our trade paperback collection, but because we were our filing tripped over the problem of “previously published material.”

Now in terms of formal registration, there still appears to be no clear consensus on whether publishing artwork and text digitally counts as prior publication, which is really weird when you think about just how many major magazines and newspapers have gone 100% digital in this age, much less webcomics. But regardless the fact is we published seven individual issues in print before gathering them in the trade. So… yeah, that’s rather unequivocally a “previously published” situation. Even though we never pursued formal registration for those issues, it disqualified the content from being formally registered now, even in the circumstance of the alterations we made such as resizing and relettering. If there *was* previously unpublished material in the collection, that could be registered, but I would have to itemize and specifically detail what to include and exclude in the scope.

So, while I briefly toyed with the notion of just giving up, I eventually did knuckle down and do exactly what they asked, going through every last bit of the book and noting what parts had not previously seen print publication. And while the back and forth turnaround on that still took several weeks, as of last week I was finally informed that the registration was approved and we should receive our certificate within two months.

Two months?!

Well, after over a year of waiting and wrangling, I suppose what was a few more weeks? And yet, in a strange departure from the previous pacing, we instead received our certificate in two days. It’s not as impressive as I imagined it would be, but it’s official. And heck, there it is online, searchable and everything!

Not sure this is ever worth going through again, but Zombie Ranch: a Tale of a Weird New West now at last has its spot in the Library of Congress archives.

Cool.